I have 500gb of files that I want to copy to a temporary drive and then back.

I would like to be able to do this as fast as possible.

I checked out doing a block level clone, which is nice and fast (a lot of my files are very small so using rsync takes ages), however I can't copy between two different partition types (with CloneZilla anyway) which I need to be able to do.

So how can I copy a bunch of data fast? I'd be happy to purchase a clonezilla alternative if it can copy between different partition types.

Thanks for that :) I left it for 8 hours and sadly it still hadn't finished though, and I could've run CloneZilla twice in that time. Are there any cloning programs which support going from NTFS->HFS?
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tobeannouncedMay 1 '11 at 0:08

THat long could imply you have a broken filesystem. Consider running Disk Uility.
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Thorbjørn Ravn AndersenAug 2 '12 at 20:13